A new Immigration Platform Technologies is due to be fully rolled out in 2017, but the support contracts for the vital legacy systems expire in 2016 although the cancellation of ICW means staff are dependent on legacy systems.

Home Office staff reported concerns about data quality to the NAO, adding that some information is manually transferred from paper to IT systems, increasing the risk of error.

Besides this, the public spending regulator claims morale is low in the Department and employees fear drawing attention to bad news so issues tend to emerge only at crisis point.

However, the NAO did report some good news – it says that although progress with Home Office technology is varied, improvements have been made in some areas.